I’ve now checked out the crests I was shown at The Original Miami Beach Antiques Show using Crestfinder (the magical and unique function on myfamilysilver.com). I’ll start with an armorial I saw on a smart pair of silver tureen covers offered by one of the dealers (as shown here):
As you can see, the crest consists of the upper figure of a woman holding a tower and some sort of plant. A search in crestfinder (which I can do, but you can’t yet…) using the simple terms “woman, castle†turns up a couple of crests including, as you can see, the one (on the left) we were looking at:
This crest, with small variations, is carried by a number of families including Aitkinson and Bailey. However, by checking the motto below the engraved armorial (“Cause caused itâ€) against the results we can (hey presto!) firmly attribute the crest to the Elphinstone family as shown here:
Now the dealer has a whole new way of promoting and adding value to his item (and the Elphinstones can buy back the family silver). Pretty cool, isn’t it?
Soon: Another crest challenge from Miami….
Sadly, this is prevalent on genaleogy sites, where people present the family arms (sic) and family tartan for some supposed ancestor. In one recent example, an individual had uploaded the arms of Cunynghame of Milncraig as those of the Earls of Glencairn without any awareness of their being different; another example was the arms of the Duke of Montrose erroneously being attached to an Earl of Menteith. It is a pity that this article is not widely available to such ancestor hunters.
Thank you for you kind comments. You are right to criticise the sites who claim that every name has arms and that there is only one set of (usually “ancient”) arms for each name, all of which is complete rubbish. New arms are being registered every year to individuals as they have been for centuries. Unfortunately these (mostly North American) sites have been going longer and have bigger budgets than us and appear higher up the search rankings than us although as we are a site that is free to use this article is available to all.